How to Edit MS Office Documents [Gmail Attachments] on Google Docs

When you have a Gmail attachment in your inbox, you can either download the attachment to your computer, save it to Google Drive or edit the file with Google Docs.Google Docs supports Microsoft Office documents, allowing you to edit MS Word and Excel documents within your inbox

How to Edit Gmail Attachments in Inbox:

Open an email that contains an attachment.

Hover your mouse over the attachment preview at the bottom of your mail and click the pencil-like icon “Edit with Google Docs”

This will open the document in Google Docs. Edit the file as required and save.

How to Edit MS Document in Google Drive:

You can edit an MS Document directly within Google Drive on your desktop or Android mobile phone. In the previous edition, you had to convert the file to Google Docs but this is no longer required.

This will open the document on Google Docs. Edit the doc as needed and save.

Things You Will Need:

For Desktop:

To edit documents in your Gmail Inbox or Google Drive, you must also have the Microsoft Office suite installed on your computer. If you need to sync documents from your computer, then you must install the Google Drive client, this is useful if you are working offline, your edits will be automatically synced to Google Drive once you are connected to the internet.

If you don’t have Microsoft Office program installed on your computer, you can still edit documents on your Chrome browser using the Google Drive Chrome extension.

For Mobile Phone:

Google Drive app for Android – The app allows you to view, edit and create MS documents on your mobile device as well as sync files.

Some of the popular files supported by Google Drive:

DOC

XLS

PPT

PDF

CAD

Google Drive allows up to 15GB of free storage which is shared with your Gmail data and Google Plus photos. You can get 100GB for only $1.99/month when you upgrade your account.